


When There's Nothing Left to Burn (You Have to Set Yourself on Fire)

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: 10000-30000 words, Community: tww_minis, M/M, Post-Canon, Psychological Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-31
Updated: 2009-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 08:36:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The things you do when you're grieving don't always make sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When There's Nothing Left to Burn (You Have to Set Yourself on Fire)

and the sickener hits; I can work till I break  
but I love the bones of you  
that, I will never escape  
\-- The Bones of You, Elbow

 

The artist had painted him wearing those thick black-rimmed glasses. They were slipping down his nose, crookedly, drawing a stripe over one eye and through the other, providing visual counterpoint to his eyebrows -- up in question or exclamation or disdain. It's always hard to tell with him. In the painting his eyes are mostly swallowed in the corona of the sun setting through the window over his shoulder. His fingers are on fire with it -- paper crinkling in flame, turning white instead of black. They are reaching into his hair, buttressing the huge quiff he had been nurturing all that year; an inch for every month his father grew less human. To me his wrist seems like a pillar in that painting, blank marble blanching in that sun, and growing fine cracks, so thin that they invited the touch of fingertips. I let my fingertips touch that polished place later on the day that the painting was finished, when his wrist was only a fallen prop against a soft pillow which was so white that it made even his alabaster places look sunburned. It was my day to kiss him; that day of recording pasts for futures, with the ink from my particular promises dry on my fingertips against his wrists and his lips.

The painting hangs in my cabin. It is only a small canvas of ten inches square, so it goes mostly unnoticed by visitors on my staircase, where the light is dim and the going steep enough that people are looking at their feet as they climb up and not the wall decorations. It doesn't match the unfinished wood panelling or the atmosphere of clean living and outdoor pursuits. At the head of the stairs there hangs a Winchester rifle, though I have never shot anything (or never _hit_ anything) in my life; I was going to take it down but the first week I was here by myself I realised that I couldn't figure out how to unhook the mountings without damaging the panels, and then remembered that it was the rifle my dad used to shoot with and that I couldn't bring myself to remove, having refurbished and redecorated the whole place to my own tastes so it looked new and ready for a new phase of ownership that week, the last trace of the cabin's previous lodger.

Huck makes a point of not saying anything when he is here, about the painting or the gun. I think he is worried that the rifle is loaded and waiting for the right occasion to make itself useful, but that is the blackness of his own gaze making shadows over mine. I'm not going to shoot myself. Who'd clean up the mess?

This has become my place to hide and here with only ghosts for company I have become monstrous. I think maybe that's the real reason for the gun, so maybe he is right after all -- maybe I'm keeping it in case someone needs to shoot the monster. It doesn't necessarily have to be me.

This was my father's cabin and I stayed here a few times as a young boy. I used to bring two suitcases along: one of clothes, and one of books, and my dad would cuff me around the head, but gently, and tell me I should play outside more, play more sports. Sailing and track never impressed him very much. I guess he didn't think they were very manly pursuits, and that I wasn't going to grow up very manly either. I guess, in a way, he was kinda right.

Huck is a place to hide too.

++

 

Sam met him on a bad day. It was snowing heavily, for one thing, and the roads and sidewalks leading to the Bartlet Campaign HQ had been inadequately cleared. (Sam had shovelled snow for twenty minutes before he could even see the wheels of his car, then sat in the sweat of that exertion, pulling at his tie underneath his sweater, for another twenty before the thing would start.) As a result most of the people who were due in for appointments and meetings, and indeed ordinary work, that day were missing, delayed or stranded somewhere else. This had led to a stand-up row between Leo, Josh and the Governor about resources and their general ability to run a Presidential campaign with three guys and the kid from the deli down the street running errands for them. Sam, who at that point knew no-one in the room besides Josh, walked in on the middle of this with his best smile and a new notebook and decided pretty quickly that he could wait a little while to be on the wrong side of Jed Bartlet's ire. The only other person in the room was Toby.

He was sitting with his arms wrapped around the back of a chair, watching the argument through one half-open eye, the other covered with his hand. He looked as though he had been watching it for some time; Sam thought that you could probably use this guy's face as a map for how well campaign morale was staying up. Currently, not well.

Without taking his eyes off the argument, or waiting for Sam to travel the full distance between the door and Toby's chair so he could introduce himself, Toby said, "Which one are you?"

"Uh, my name's Sam Seaborn?"

"And will you be changing that answer later?" Toby said, underneath a long sigh.

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm just saying you might want to think about not sounding unsure about your own name when you introduce yourself to the Governor. He doesn't care for wavering."

Sam smiled, despite the stormclouds rolling over the man's face. "I'll try to remember that."

"You know Josh," Toby said, having raised a hand to point at the three men yelling at each other in the centre of the room. Josh was wearing a threadbare Harvard sweater and a pained expression of diplomacy tempered with way too much coffee, and Sam smiled at the sight. "The only man in New Hampshire wearing a suit in this weather is Leo McGarry, and he's in charge. The other guy is the Governor."

"I figured," Sam said, trying to smile in a bright and keen sort of way.

Toby looked up at him with hooded, impassive eyes. "Yes, I can see you're sharp."

"I do try. Princeton and -- "

"Gage Whitney in Manhattan, yes I know. I'm Toby Ziegler. I won't begin our relationship with lies, Sam, and tell you that I'm pleased to meet you because I'm not. You wanna know what your job is going to chiefly consist of?"

"I'm intrigued," Sam said, still smiling; grinning by that point. He was finding that Toby's dourness brought out a corresponding and inexplicable joy in him. He was already thinking that listening to this guy rant and rave in the slow hours between important speeches and meet-and-greets would certainly be a bonus for his own entertainment.

"You job will be to do exactly what I tell you. You're my understudy. You answer to me. You got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"So, go get some coffee. You can brown nose with the Governor later; we might have to assume the mantle of the only productively occupied people in the place today."

From then the pattern was set. Sam was happy with it, for a while anyway.

+++

 

I went to Brooklyn to see him -- to see them both -- the first time. I booked a flight and packed a suitcase. I remembered the right stops and changes on the subway. I remembered, after a block or two, the feeling of a New York sidewalk under my feet and that particular way that New Yorkers have of walking so that they expend the least amount of effort for the maximum amount of distance covered, that gliding march that I forgot when I moved to D.C.. Except when I watched Toby walking, when I walked with him. Toby, since he was a New Yorker down to the encoding of his DNA, never lost the trick and, sometimes, through some kind of bizarre proximity and endurance-based osmosis, I'd find that I remembered it in his presence. We'd be in step, gliding along together, bound for the nearest distributor of caffeine.

When Huck and I went out walking the first day I was in Brooklyn, I realised that I'd remembered how to do it again, that he had taught me all over again. I cuffed the side of his left sneaker with my shoe as we went on, as we stood at an intersection, and told him that we were walking in step. I'd expected a grimace, or a gentle sneer, or the kind of blankness of disbelief that Toby's face would have produced when faced with that kind of information, but he smiled at me. I think that's when it happened: on the edge of Boerum Hill heading for Downtown, with the skeleton of a tree dead for winter rising over his shoulder, a blue scarf wrapped around his neck but no other concessions to the cold; the flowering of that smile as brief as the sight of my breath in the air as I spoke. I think that's right, anyway. That's how I remember it.

He was a poet, even then. He has that much of an inheritance. He says he thinks he writes more like me than like his father; I don't disagree, except on specifics -- words that I would have turned to bright white dust with what Toby used to call my genetic pre-disposition for idealism, Huck makes into a kind of dark fire, burning the pages down as he reads from them so that, by the last period, nothing is left.

In that way, I think of him as something that Toby and I made together; unconsciously, unintentionally, but bearing both our fingerprints all the same. We made him between the pages of the books I'm told he would pull down from shelves that were too high for his hands, standing on a series of chairs that shrank as he grew and explored the the uncharted expanses of his father's library. I was there, too. I left him signposts and signals written in smoke and the tread of my shoes in the dirt path.

He writes about the same things either of us would have written about if we had been novelists. He makes freedom a difficult character in all his stories, and New York his favourite lover. He can write fifty words about a street in Brooklyn that make me regret the down payment I made on my place in Orange County. He thrills me with words in a way that made me realise I had been in mourning for something I did not even know was missing.

So he was, and is, a poet. He writes prose too, now, but his first instinct is poetry. And that is what we had been doing on that day in Brooklyn. He was giving a reading at an arts event at City College, where he was a student then. Toby was going and, since I was there too, he invited me to come along. He did so gruffly, quietly, in that embarrassed avoidant way he had with me. Huck invited me with a little more enthusiasm, because he felt like I _should_ be there. Toby used to tease me about my interest in Huck's writing, in his ability and growth. He used to say that I enjoyed being a patron and that it showed up the less altruistic aspects of my personality, as if I had some greater kind of influence over his son that he did not have, as if I could have claimed that kind of power. But it is true that I used to send him books, poetry I thought he should read, empty notebooks, that kind of thing. (Even then I wanted him to write over me, to fill up that feeling which is not emptiness but is neither any other nameable thing -- just a feeling he gave me, just a hint of something that I couldn't grab hold of, or didn't want to -- with something he made. And that is another inheritance, I suppose.) I sent him things, like I sent Molly things, like I sent C.J.'s daughter and Josh's son things. I'd still send Zoey Bartlet gifts sometimes, except that I worry that she's too old for them now. Maybe Huck came first, maybe he was my favourite. I don't know. I had a hand in the confluence of events that sent him to that podium on the dusty stage at CCNY but, sitting in the audience beside Huck's father, realising that I was listening for the times that Toby's voice was echoing in Huck's mouth, I felt invisible. I was happy to be invisible. I wanted to stay in that auditorium and listen until I was no longer thirsty with whatever strange enthusiasm I'd found there between me and the stage.

The three poems he read were all about Toby. I suppose that might have been the start of it.

The next day we went walking. The next day I realised my skin was tingling with my proximity to him as we sat in Starbucks drinking coffee and talking about books. The next day I wanted to put my fingertips to the tender skin at the base of his throat, and after a while I found an excuse and adjusted his scarf and scolded him gently for coming out without a coat and allowed my thumb to touch the place where his collarbone was left uncovered by both the scarf and his t-shirt. The next day he took me back to his apartment and it all happened over again -- coffee, writers' talk, staring at the kitchen table instead of his face and listening for his father in his words, and my hands on his face this time, in his hair. I knew by then that he is gay; I knew when he was thirteen years old, and I suppose he must have known that I am, if not quite the same, not very different. I wondered, aloud, how he knew and he just laughed. It sounded like thunder, and rolled against my chest. He took hold of my hand. That was difficult, for me, because he has his father's hands -- exact copies, even down to the bitten nails, but I got a hold of myself. Somehow.

Sleeping with men is easier than sleeping with women, for me anyway. Huck exactly didn't make it easy, but then he is his father's son. But I felt that he was trying to calm me, trying to make up for something, trying to call the shots. I guess I looked nervous. I guess the Ziegler men do that to me.

I was touched by the way he touched me, by how boyish he was. I didn't fall in love with him all at once, like I did his dad, but the all the million sparks he made rolled up into fireworks and exploded against the peeling ceiling of the bedroom in his small apartment. He made a fireball of it: bright, hot, impossible to escape. I was gentle, though, because he makes me gentle. I think it was the first time, for him. We haven't talked about it since. I was touched and I touched him: fingerprints, the bones of him, the process of writing it over again; the palimpsest we began.

I wonder now whether we already knew what was going to happen next. I don't believe in that kind of thing, really, but I have to wonder all the same. Did I gather him up to be the thing the storm could break against? I don't know. I hope not, I really do.

But the next thing was Toby being killed, instantly, in a car wreck (on the interstate north of New York). I got a phonecall from Andy and by then he'd been dead almost a whole day. I found that hard to conceptualise; the idea kept slipping out of my head, like peas off a fork, or something even more prosaic. I found myself walking around my house, all that day, knowing that I should be unhappy -- weeping, rending garments, whatever atheists do to rail at death -- but forgetting why. Forgetting most of everything. Huck called the next day. He wanted to know if he could see me, soon, after the arrangements, the funeral, after the requirements that follow a death. His voice seemed to have dropped a whole octave and yet also seem soft, and warm, and resonant. Of course, to me, he sounded like Toby; more precisely than he had ever done before.

++

 

Sam was effortlessly hypnotised by the break of Toby's grin: a slow combustion, like the tripod of logs turning to ash and sparks as they fall into the fireplace which they are sitting beside. It was late in the evening and Camp David was silent, but for the wind and the movement of trees. Everyone else had gone to bed hours before; they were surrounded by a mess of papers. Sam was sleepy; Toby sharp with liquor. His teeth flashed and his tongue shone wetly as it passed over their edges and Sam was only thinking one thought that felt real, in amongst the threads of their arguments and remembering to respond somehow to the punchline of his jokes. Just one thought: how to tessellate my mouth against yours, shapes made to fit the ones you are making now, kisses disappearing as the pattern fills up the room and we forget which was the first kiss, the original. Sam blinked as Toby reached for his glass and took a sip of bourbon, and when he opened his eyes again his boss was still staring, the grin having calmed to a simmer of amusement.

"You're doing math problems in your head to keep awake, aren't you?" he asked. His voice was soft enough to be lost underneath the crackling of the fire. "Break it to me gently, Sam."

Sam smiled. "I'm not, I swear. Maybe a few anagrams. Maybe."

He laughed in a flash of white and red. Sam blinked again, as though someone has just struck a match too close to his face, then grinned back while the warmth of a blush spread across his face. It was too dark for Toby to notice; the light from the fire and a few lamps to accompany the growl of a Maryland winter rising through the trees and reverbing against the windows all they had. Sam looked down at his feet anyway, just for the sake of looking away. His shoes had come off two hours ago, so by then he was staring at the nervous movement of his toes inside black socks and how that movement seems to disappear in this dim light against the dark red of the carpet and the sluggishness of his eyes.

He blinked a few more times then said, "I think my visual cortex wants to go to bed," which raised (he dared a look upwards) another smile from Toby.

"We have to get you to a lab somewhere. I'm sure fascinating things could be learned with the application of scientific method and a bare minimum of electric shocks."

"I have very advanced verbal skills."

"And you'll be sharing them with the group very soon, I'm sure."

Sam grinned, with defeat mostly. He's not a sore loser. When, as he stood to leave, all the blood seemed to rush immediately to his head he wondered whether Toby realised that three of his grins in quick succession has roughly the same intoxication quotient as three vodka shooters. He decided that mentioning this particular discovery would probably just get him shipped off to Johns Hopkins so that Ellie Bartlet can stick him with needles and electrodes all the quicker, and so shut his mouth immediately after opening it.

"Bed?" Toby asked, turning his head to follow the progress Sam was making out of his chair and towards the door. Sam wished it were acceptable to tell him that being watched by Toby Ziegler only makes it more likely that he will fall over something and break an irreplaceable national ornament.

He nodded instead. "Bed."

"Okay. "

"You coming?"

"You're worried maybe that I'll be down here stealing Jed Bartlet's priceless trinkets?"

Sam smiled again. "No," he said, "It's just lonely down here is all. And windy. And a little creepy maybe."

The grin had retreated all the way back to Toby's eyes. The dying fire still glimmered there. "I'm tough. The ghosts won't know what hit them."

Sam said, "You can't hit ghosts ... " in what he only realised after the last syllable had left his mouth was a spacey, drifting voice, and then walked into the table behind the chairs where they had been sitting. He opened his mouth to say something reassuring when Toby jumped up out of his chair and put a hand underneath one of Sam's elbows and the other lightly at his waist about where the second belt loop sagged out from the waistband of Sam's old jeans, but the only word that came out of his mouth was, "Ow."

"You're really not supposed to get wasted on the President's dime, Sam," was what Toby whispered into his ear. His body was too close and his voice too soft, like the promise of a bed in the dark somewhere safe, and Sam knew that the blush was rising over his cheeks and darkening over the bones. He was ashamed of himself when he allowed his weight to disappear into that greater bulk of Toby's, and felt as though he was sinking, and knew that he would be caught. "What were you drinking?" was what Toby said next, letting go of Sam's waist for a second before he replaced his hand at Sam's shoulder. His thumb brushed an inch over the seam of Sam's shirt, once, twice. Sam blinked again, widened his eyes, tried to imagine a glass of water being thrown in his face; tried to forget the various points of warmth that were pinning him in place.

"Nothing. Ah. Just, just a little wine. That's all. I'm just tired, Toby. It's warm in here, I'm sleepy."

Toby tilted his head a fraction to the right; visual assessment: likelihood that Sam will trip over something and break his neck on the way up to bed, approximately 65%, and therefore too much of a risk. Sam tried to smile at him and raised his hands to make some gesture that meant _no, really, I'm fine, just tired, a little bit drunk and possibly dyspraxic_ but he found that his arms were less heavy than even the lightest touch of Toby's hands and that they could not float under that weight. His hands flapped around a little by his sides, and then he gave in.

"Yeah. Okay. A little unsteady."

"I was thinking more a danger to yourself and others."

"You can't get me committed for being tired and drunk, Toby," Sam said as he was turned around at the shoulders by Toby's hands and pointed towards the door.

"We'll see."

"I'm just saying that writing the State of the Union while wearing a strait jacket will probably be pretty hard."

"I will bet you ten dollars I'd get it done quicker with you in protective custody."

"No, you need me. You need me for pie runs."

Toby's chuckle billowed like a sail distorted by the first surge of a storm against the back of Sam's neck. He said, "You could be a little quicker with the pie runs," as he closed the door behind them both.

"Last time you sent me for pie I got you three different flavours _and_ jelly doughnuts, Toby!"

"I'm not disputing that, Sam," Toby said, as he pushed his knuckles against the small of Sam's back in order to encourage him up the stairs that led to the bedrooms. "What I'm saying is that it was an hour and a half before you got back to the office and I wrote five hundred more words while you were gone. I was concerned that you'd taken a left turn somewhere and ended up in a Starbucks in Alberquerque. You've gotta be more efficient if you want to hold on to your job as my flunky."

"I actually do not want to hold on to that job, Toby."

Toby's hand tightened a little on Sam's shoulder when they reached the top of the stairs. "Sure you do," he said.

Sam pointed south down the dark corridor. "I'm this way."

Toby nodded. "Yeah."

"I'll see you tomorrow," Sam said, and wondered if Toby could hear the sadness he heard in his own voice; whether he had realised then that this parting had never gotten any easier and was maybe even getting harder every time he had to make it.

"If the ghosts don't get you," he said. His hand was still resting on Sam's shoulder and, as a gust of wind blows up against the windows, it slipped away. He raised his eyebrows at the wind and tipped Sam a quick wink. "Careful."

Sam stared at him, and then smiled the smile he thought of in his head as the one that made it crystal damn clear how he felt about his boss. It always surprised him how good it felt to do that, how easy and freeing it seemed to not say the words but just make them understood by means of pictures in the air.

But only said, "Night, Toby," and watched as he disappeared down the corridor.

Sam walked down the corridor, in the other direction, to his own room. He removed his clothes and lay down in the bed, between cold, clean sheets. There was no moon that night, and no stars were visible. He had thought about it -- about letting his hand take itself between his thighs, thinking of Toby, and letting the choices narrow down to one. But he did not do it. The room bore the scent of the President's aftershave and his own skin was still tingling from its recent proximity to Toby's hands and the whisper of his voice. Sam couldn't do it, and as he thought more on it, as the blacks and whites of the thing grew more and more contrasted, didn't even want to. Not really. Not enough to take the risk. It would have been too easy to let Toby swallow up everything else and become moon-bright and swollen in him. Sam knew his own heart well enough, and how little it would take to tip the balance towards Toby and away from everything else. He won't do it.

He turned over in the bed, closed his eyes and folded his arm underneath his head. He tried to sleep. It took a few hours.

++

 

I read at his funeral. I gave the eulogy. Everyone thought that was the correct form, the spin we could put on events that might keep them making some kind of sense. I argued for Huck, but Andy asked me, and I can't say no to her. I find it hard to do anything for his wife other than exactly what she asks for. She said it would be too hard for Huck, almost like a cruelty, and really I see her point. In the end I compromised: I read my own words, finding them stilted and arrogant as they swelled my tongue, and then I read one of Huck's poems. I closed my eyes while I was reading, and bent my head down too close to the lectern. I don't know if they heard me. They were all concentrating on their own tears by then anyway. I closed my eyes so that he wouldn't see me, and so that I could see him. Both of them. Either of them. I think by that point, I wasn't sure anymore.

Later, he came to me.

I was crying, because of who I am. He wasn't, for the same reason. As he sank further into himself, he looked more and more like Toby. It's around the eyes, really, and the downturn of his mouth. In the half-light I couldn't see him well; my longing filled in the blanks, with india ink, with scraps of clay, with the shadows I laid on his face, with what I lost against him.

Does it matter that I hugged him tight when it was over? I was sorry, I remember that; I remember saying so. I can't remember why, and I don't think I really knew then. A promise I broken, I think. One promise that had stopped mattering a week before.

++

 

Huck hasn't the heart to say that he hates the cabin. As his car approaches the dirt path that leads up to the place the engine makes a desperate coughing noise and he feels something give way in the clutch and then the whole thing stops moving altogether. The light is going -- it's almost six-thrity on a cold day in September in (Maine) -- and out of the dusk a deeper shadow which is the shape of the cabin and its two yellow windows, glowing like cats' eyes is rising. His holdall of clothes, novels and notebooks is beside him on the passenger seat. Huck pats it with the flat of his hand; watches as his fingers seem to disappear in the darkness seeping into the car, pushes his glasses up his nose, then gets out of the car.

He doesn't have the heart to tell Sam that the cabin makes him claustrophobic in the night time and agoraphobic in the day; that the little clearing in which the cabin stands, surrounding on all sides by trees that obscure the sky and the tail of the road that leads the hell out of here, feels like a holding pen: a barely tolerated incursion into that place of trees and wild things. Or that he sometimes dreams that, while they are sleeping, the trees will press over the path and the leaves they threw down on the dirt, over the car and the basketball hoop, over the hatchet that is propped up beside the door, up to the windows -- pressing their darknesses into the cabin, filling the air up with the smell of pine needles and leaf mould, and that he will wake with leaves pouring out of his mouth and Sam's skin hardening to bark under his fingers.

He never tells Sam about the dreams where his father rises out of that place, blank and monstrous. His skin is always paler than the moonlight that soaks over the ground. He stands in between the trees, disappearing and reappearing as the shadows shift with wind and time and the clouds that go over the moon. He never moves, and then he fades. That is usually when Huck wakes, with the usual sweat on his forehead. He still wakes up wanting to scream. He hasn't yet.

And he can't find the words to tell Sam about the hugeness of the spaces that seem to open up inside him on the days when it rains over the sun; vast chasms that make it hard to breathe because he feels as though one lung is in Maine and the other is in (New Hampshire), the membrane stretched to translucency; taking his thoughts with it, making them thin and weightless, until the gap between the departure of one word and the arrival of the next seems years, centuries, geological ages of time, and he is swallowed up into blankness.

He has an idea that Sam would say these reactions are due to grief, as though the disruption of time, space, gravity and reality is a normal reaction to losing his father.

As normal as what they are doing anyway, Huck supposes.

He scratches at his cheek as he walks up to the cabin door lugging his bag behind him through the leaves instead of lifting it up onto his shoulder. His stubble is really itching; he is not used to the beard, or the ferocity with which it grows if he lets it be.

Sam had asked. In a soft voice that didn't sound at all like him -- too deep and hoarse, like he has spent all day yelling at someone who probably didn't deserve it -- he asked, over the phone, with the crackle of the miles between Huck's place in Brooklyn and Sam's condo in California, if he would mind letting his beard grow for the next time; for the trip to the cabin. _Please, Huck. Please._

The hair is already turning his jaw black and unshaping the curve of his chin. It burns as it grows, he thinks. He thinks he can feel every milimetre pushing through his skin, like a whiskey chaser applied to a hundred thousand pinprick wounds someone made in his face while he was sleeping. He has allowed it to grow anyway.

He gets to the door and kicks the toes of his sneakers against the stones that have gathered by the steps and the jamb, trying to dislodge the sticky accumulation of leaves and mud and the beginning of the decay of the season that is turning his white Converse a dispiriting shade of brown. Then he knocks on the door. While he's waiting he fiddles with the zipper of the holdall and hauls it up to his shoulder and then back down to the ground. He shifts from one foot to another and turns into the dusk pushing against his back, eyes it suspiciously, then turns back to the door, which is now open.

Sam gave up being easy to read on his forty-fifth birthday, Huck's father told him once. Since Huck was only twelve at the time he didn't have the space or the experience or the will to argue with that statement or even really understand what it meant. As Huck looks up from the toes of his sneakers to Sam's face (incarnadined around the eyes; dashes of grey in his bare stubble, turned to mercury flashes by the glints of failing light; something strained in his jaw now, something old; and the strange, dark blue mess that grief has made in the shallows of his eyes) he thinks he finally does. In half an hour, maybe less, Sam will have removed the skin of sweetness, and the one of welcome, and will have caused to evaporate into a few hundred disparate molecules gathering in the hair at his temples, the grey storm of mourning that is rolling off him now, as he stands at the door. In half an hour he will be flayed down to what he thinks is honesty -- his fingerprints making copies of themselves in the skin of Huck's throat and his breath catching against the most hidden places of Huck's body. In half an hour he will believe that they are dealing with whatever it is they need to deal with; that bodies will sort out whatever hearts find impossibly obscure. He will believe that in disappearing inside each other they are eliminating distance and erasing misunderstanding, and that Huck understands everything on account of having been brought to orgasm with Sam's hand enfolded his penis.

Huck finds distance everywhere. He dreams about Sam twitching at the end of a long red thread, the crimson of the fish-hook making ink blot on his shirt, just where the monogram lies. He finds it in the creep of Sam's eyes across his face; the cataloguing and saving of the angles and curves and inadequacies and vulnerabilities of his physiognomy that Sam knows from somewhere else in time and place. Huck feels the distance between his own body and the sweet and warm place that his father's once was in Sam's gaze. He feels it in that damn painting that he averts his eyes from every time he needs to walk up the cabin staircase, wishing for the lights to go out before he gets to the head.

He pushes his glasses up his nose again and tries to smile.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey, Huck," Sam says in reply. The gulp of air over the 'u' in his name is missing in Sam's throat. It is missing from anyone's pronunciation of his name; only his dad ever seemed to say the word in a way Huck could bear. He made it into an endearment by acknowledging how powerless he was in the face of the owner of the name. Huck swallows; Sam is trying. He almost had it that time.

"Hey," Huck says again.

"Come on in, can't you? Give me that bag."

Huck hands it over and watches Sam mock-wince from the weight. He waits for it --

"You brought a library, huh?" Sam says

\-- and there it is.

A smile crackles between them, getting lost as the light falls away, snapping underneath Huck's foot as he climbs up into the doorway, and passes inside.

They kiss in the light of the doorway, after the door has closed. There is a lamp on the side table by the door where Sam has thrown his own car keys and the detritus of his pockets and by the light of this, Huck looks up into his face again. The shadows and light seem painted on him, not skilfully or kindly, and the angles of his jaw and chin seem too sharp for a few seconds, until Huck's eye becomes accustomed to them again. His eyes are, as usual, blue enough to make up for the jolt of fear he received when they looked at him, and when Sam's fingers began to stroke the growth of hair on Huck's cheek.

"It suits you," is what Sam says.

"I don't know."

"It does," he says, starting to smile in that way that has always seemed to Huck to carry a very distinct subtext: smile and it'll be all right, smile and we'll be okay. "It makes you look distinguished." He nudges Huck's shoulder and grins. Huck grins back, or gives it a college try. His heart is hurting.

They sit awhile. Sam makes coffee and Huck drinks it, swallowing it down like droplets of molten lead. The caffeine hit is like the beginning of withdrawal, or what he imagines that would be like; it makes his throat burn and saliva leap up on his tongue and fill his mouth unpleasantly. He swallows it down, drowns it with more coffee, then winces as it exaggerates the sensation. Sam smiles at him from across the kitchen table, as if to ask: what's up?

"Sorry. Tired. My car broke down in the drive ... "

Sam nods, like he already knew that. "We'll fix it up. Don't worry."

It occurs to Huck then that he is, effectively, trapped here. Then it occurs to him to wonder about the verb choice in his last sentence. He has nowhere to be this week, no work to go to or assignments to complete -- the last of those things were finished days ago; there is a list with every item struck through still sitting on his desk in Brooklyn. But: he did not tell anyone, even Molly, where he was going or who he would be with; he left his cell at the apartment; even with the car he is not confident that he could find his way back through that maze of trees that seemed to shift and change around him even as he was navigating it.

There is also the prospect of Sam. Being trapped in this cabin with Sam. Can you be trapped with your lover? Huck doesn't know the answer to that question anymore. He begins to rattle his fingers against the table, beating out the main drum line of a Smiths song on the thin strip of the table's surface between his own chest and the position of his coffee cup. It is not a particularly calming pursuit.

Sam is still smiling, though now in an inquiring way, with his head slightly to one side.

"What?" Sam says.

"Nothing. Sorry. Just ... thinking."

Sam does chuckle then, to himself, down into his coffee.

"What?"

"I was thinking that if I asked you what the matter really was you'd just do exactly what Toby used to do."

Huck feels all the tiny hairs at the back of his neck stand up when Sam says his father's name. There is such tenderness in his voice, such a depth of loss. When Sam raises his head again his eyes flash, blue as fireflies in the dark.

"And what was that?" Huck asks, quietly; he really wants to know.

"Pass me off with something. Give me some excuse. Or just walk away." Sam smiles, a faraway smile; his _when we were heroes_ smile, Huck thinks. "Your dad wasn't much for confessions."

"He just didn't ... he didn't like talking about those things."

Sam nods. "Yeah."

"I don't either."

Sam nods again, smiles. It seems a sad, worn-out one to Huck. "Yeah." He holds his hand out across the table and makes that odd little twist with his mouth that means, or used to mean, _won't you please?_ in Huck's head. His hand is tanned from even the most erratic Maryland sunshine and to Huck seems older, more like a man's hand than the boyish ones Sam seemed to have before, when Huck was a child who sometimes played catch with his father's old friends. Now they are darker, and more crooked. His nails are no longer immaculate (they have dirt underneath them, Huck thinks) and there are scratches all over the skin. Huck touches these first; new cuts, they sting against the oils of his own fingers and Sam winces from it. Huck strokes them gently, with the pad of his thumb and the backs of his fingers, as he would stroke a dog that wanted to be friends. Then he puts his right hand -- small, pale, bitten nails, hair running across the wrists -- into Sam's. Sam squeezes his fingers.

"I'm sorry," he says, "I don't know whether you don't want me to talk about him, Huck."

Huck suddenly wishes he could withdraw his hand from Sam's. "It's okay," he says. "It's why were here, after all." Sam's fingers tighten, then slacken away in an instant. "Sorry," Huck adds, like an afterthought.

"Huck -- "

"No, my bad. Some things you don't say, right?"

"I wouldn't go that far, actually," Sam says, in a taut voice, like he's picking every word carefully.

"How far would you go?"

"Pushing me into a fight isn't going to work, Huck."

"No. Dad told me that never worked with you. You'd just sit there and smile, he said. And it was infuriating. It still is."

"I'm sorry."

"Way I figure, if I tell you that it'll only be what you want -- for me to be more like him, act like him, speak like him. Grow a beard. You want the name of my shul?"

"Huck -- "

"I'm here too, aren't I?"

Sam's eyebrows raise a fraction. His eyes are turning with the dusk; they seem almost silvery now. Huck is just beginning to wonder if he is being hypnotised when Sam says,

"The door's over there. Go if you want to."

"I'm here, _too_, Sam."

"I can call you a cab, Huck. Cabs can still get up the driveway with your car stuck there. There are no bears, no monsters. Nothing's gonna eat you up."

"Only the fairy tale prince," Huck says.

"Well, I wouldn't go that far."

"You aren't going far at all today."

"You do sound like him, you know that?"

"I guess genetics did you a favour there," Huck says. He means to shout it, but the words are muted somewhere along the journey from his brain to his tongue to the air. Instead it sounds like the noise a hammer makes striking a stone, and reverberates dully in his head. He notices his teeth begin to ache, and runs his tongue over them.

"Stop talking like that."

"Isn't that what you want?"

"Stop it, Huck."

"Isn't it?"

He is leaning over the table quicker than Huck can react and he's surprised by that and by the fact that it is Sam Seaborn who is now grabbing him by his hair and pulling his head back; Sam who could trip over a pebble on the sidewalk, who strikes out so often 'K' might as well be his middle initial, has made his hands so quick and light that they disappeared for a sliver of a second as they went for Huck's neck.

"Stop it," he says, in a voice that sounds strangled. His hands tug in Huck's hair for a moment, then let go all at once. He is gone, across the table, across the room, out into the yard again with a series of doors banging shut in his wake. Huck coughs a little, swallows to get some saliva back into his mouth, rubs his throat, then follows.

Sam is standing in the dark, smoking a cigar. Huck almost rolls his eyes. Then he smiles, doggedly, in the face of inevitable disaster.

Sam is looking out into the woods. He disappears into the shadows in diagonal strips where the light from the cabin windows has forgotten him and the blackness of the trees claimed him. And that, Huck thinks, is a piece of imagery to remember, for a lot of reasons.

"Sam."

"C'mon, Huck. Go away."

"No."

Sam laughs, or makes a noise that approximates to a laugh. "Did Toby give you a cheat sheet or something?"

"You know what I like most about this?" Huck says, not waiting for an answer, barrelling on with his impression. "What I like most about this is how you're acting like you're the only one who lost anything. Like my mom, my sister, my grandfather, my cousins, C.J., Josh, everyone else, not to mention me, will just be able to get over it. But you, you're special. Because you _loved_ him. Because you were in love with him for twenty years and you were too chicken to say anything about it."

Huck takes a few more steps over the fallen leaves. Sam is getting clearer. The tip of the cigar is glowing though it is at rest between Sam's fingers, hanging by his side. Huck can hear the sound of Sam's tears, or rather the breaths that underline their arrival; ragged like the sound of a man running through low branches.

"My father would have kicked your ass," Huck says, with as little inflection as he can manage. "He would have handed you your ass with a little bow on top. Right now I'm sorry he's not here mostly because I'll never see him do that."

Huck takes the last few steps. He can feel the warmth of Sam's body now, the troposphere of their intimacy. He wants to curl around it at that moment, close his eyes, forget to be responsible. He puts out one hand as a compromise. It feels like reaching into a dark mirror, as though his hand is being set alight, milimetre by milimetre, until it reaches the centre of Sam's back and stops. Sam's breath hitches, then he swallows it down.

"I'm sorry he's not here to see you fuck his little boy."

Huck takes one more step. His cheek gets warm quickly against Sam's ribs and cashmere sweater. His erection jumps up against Sam's hip. His arms tighten: bear hug, reach like the equator, put your arms around me, squeeze me to death.

++

 

I won't talk about the sex. He wouldn't want me to do that. He's old-fashioned in that way. In a lot of ways.

I dream about his fair skin and dark hair. I have the imprint of his mouth across my skin as if it has been laid in wet clay. I am clay. I think I am waiting for him to rub the aleph from my forehead.

++

 

In the morning they fuck. Huck's mouth fills up with apologies that don't sound sincere because Sam gives them with his cock rubbing up against Huck's belly. Sam rubs his wet forefinger over Huck's mouth, leaves traces of his own come in Huck's beard, making two patches on either side of Huck's chin. Huck lets him. It's worse than that: wants him too, has fallen into Sam's body too often now to not understand that his own skin cries out for this backwards worship and that within Sam's eyes he can feel his own bones growing broader and his body acquire profundity not its own; he feels more like a man naked on Sam's bed than he ever has before. He feels his mind become dark ocean blue with the strength of his orgasm -- Sam on top of him, Sam's cock stuck in him, and Sam's hand trying to prove perpetual motion between their two bellies -- falling down beyond the reach of the sun, breathing nothing but salt water. When they kiss Huck tries to pass the water that is drowning him into Sam's mouth, but Sam is living on the air and the rustle of trees and does not open his mouth for fire and water. Huck throws himself into Sam's arms, presses his body close into the alcoves and treasuries of comfort that Sam can offer. He is still comforting, even when half a monster. Huck puts his face into the curve between Sam's jaw and shoulder and exhales as Sam presses his cheek against the crown of his head, then makes a sharp inhale, taking in dust and huge heat and the taste of the smell of their coupling as he does so, when Sam clasps a hand over the same place and strokes Huck's hair roughly, with his fingers shaking.

This is where it falls apart, for Huck. He feels his bones contract again, as though they were muscles or flesh. He is again aware of his beard burning in his skin. Sam has both his hands on Huck's cheeks, holding his head still to be kissed. Huck suddenly feels much too tired to move and so he allows Sam to press his wet mouth against his face and has no reaction to the sensation of the saliva cooling in the air.

++

 

When he was a boy, just a kid of eight or nine, we used to play. He was a quiet kid, and though Toby was always trying to encourage him to play baseball he always preferred books, paper, drawing, writing; things that let him do the things that he was best at -- watching, recording, measuring, reproducing, interpreting. Anyway, Molly more than made up for his lack of an athletic streak. She would go to Yankees games with Toby, she played Little League, soccer, all that stuff. I remember Toby telling me that she was heckling him for a field hockey kit one time, and that Toby said that the attraction was all in the opportunities that game offers for hacking at people's shins with a big stick, that somewhere along the way some Viking DNA got into Molly's heritage and soon she'd be pillaging Baltimore. I remember that I laughed over the phone, the way you do when someone you're in love with makes a joke, just to you. I mean like it's not only the funniest thing you've ever heard, but that it seems to make the world brighter, like a flare just got let off in the room with you and your eyes fill up with red sparks. I laughed, anyway, then asked if Huck had asked for a corresponding present. I always was curious, you know? Toby thought for a while, or at any rate the line was silent but for the sound of his shallow breaths. Then he said that Huck wanted a telescope, that he had also expressed some interest in the possibility of a new baseball, but mostly the telescope. I remember that I smiled, because that sounded just like him; a new horizon, some new expanse that Huck wanted to impose some kind of order on, with questions and observations. I asked Toby if he'd get it and Toby smiled (I could tell; the change in the pattern and texture of his breathing, and the tone of what he said next) and made a joke about the mortgage.

The next time I went over there the telescope was mounted in Huck's room. The eyepiece and the lens were clean; totally lacking in the fingerprints of a nine year old boy, or anyone else. Huck was a little reluctant to let anyone else touch the instrument and he was fastidious with his own possessions. He only let me look through it once, on an evening during the same visit when I stayed up and watched the stars with him. We couldn't see much of anything because of the city lights and the clouded layers of darkness that covered the sky that night, but Venus was visible (Huck pointed it out) and we made out Orion's belt. I told him the story about getting his dad lost on the way to Wesley Police Station and he laughed and I felt like maybe things weren't so terrible (I was a little depressed at that time, what with one thing and another -- mostly my failure to do a decent impression of Josh Lyman at my job) if I could make this boy laugh like that. It sounded like bells, to me, a vast chasm of sound that I fell into, for a moment. We were good buddies, back then.

In the end Huck fell asleep, lying out on the carpet in his bedroom, beside me. I carried him back to his bed and tucked him up. He felt strange in my arms, both strong and solid, wriggling a little in his sleep, and so small and inexplicable, little fingers and his father's dark, pouting bottom lip. I loved him, I think, because it was okay to. You're allowed to love a boy like Huck when you are an adult, because they seem more like you than you are: gravity and intent distilled so far down that it appears in your head like thick black ink, so that you want to hold him tight and promise him that the bullies don't know shit and the pain will go away. That's what I always wanted someone to promise me, anyway, when I was that age.

The rest of that night I spent with Toby, drinking bourbon. He asked me if Huck had shown me Venus and I said that he had. Toby smiled, nodded. _He's gonna fly out there with the flag, I think_, he said. _It's his now_.

++

 

That afternoon, in back of the cabin where the trees open up into a pre-parted Red Sea -- an avenue Huck imagines Sam striding down with open palms, pressing on the waves -- they play a little one on one. Huck, at five foot seven, is too short to be any good at the game. He is reduced to watching Sam's salmon leaps beneath the hoop, and observing the spread of the sweat stains underneath Sam's arms and in a dark grey stripe down the centre of his Princeton shirt. With his hair damp from the effort of the exercise and his eyes wild with the adrenaline, Sam seems both more familiar and more sinister to Huck. It takes him a few minutes to realise that this savage version of his friend is drawn in the same angry reds and frenzied blues that take over his skin and the shadows between his bones when they are in bed together. Sam tries to laugh it away here as he does there: bending over with his hands clamped to his thighs, breathing heavily then wiping the sweat from his forehead and cheeks, letting out the breathy notes of what would sound like a chuckle if it wasn't muffled by the trees and torn in two as it escapes from between Sam's teeth. Huck stares at him as he tries to smile and it comes out all fangs and sweat. He comes across the makeshift court towards Huck, shoving his sleeves up to his elbows, his shoes scuffling, his teeth bright white, and reaches out to take hold of Huck's shoulder and pull him close, or punch him against the bone. Huck isn't sure which he intends to do, but feints anyway, ducks aside and claps the ball down from between Sam's hands and runs back towards the basket and, breathless, lands it in the centre of the hoop. It drops through with nothing more than a dry rustling noise. Huck collects the ball, and takes off for the cabin.

He hears Sam's voice (_Huck! Hey, Huck! Wait up, buddy!_) and almost slips on the path, sneakers without grip on the leaf mould and gravel-soaked mud, but he makes it to the door and reaches for the handle and turns it and slips inside. Huck stands with his back against the door once he has closed it behind him, pulse racing and a trickle of sweat making the collar of his tee damp. He feels Sam's body thud against the door through his ribs and buttocks, feels the single beat of Sam's fist on the frame through his shoulder. He shouts Huck's name once more, and then disappears from the step. Huck is aware of the change in the atmosphere, as though a stormcloud has evaporated and the low pressure lifted from his brain. Sam has been throbbing in his head like a migraine; he only notices it now from its absence.

Huck springs back from the door and tests the handle. He turns the key, fiddles with the Yale lock. Then he switches it open again. He can't lock Sam out of his own home, as if he were a monster, a murderer; a dark thing looking to suck all the light from the place. The spark is almost out, dampened by trees and the heaviness of this new world in which it cannot burn as brightly as before, but Huck still sees it; embers, glowing. He wonders if anything could put it out. He imagines coals being crushed between his own fingers; coals that do not burn because they are too cold and which leave a thick soot in the creases of his fingerprints. But still in the curve of his palms there is a small confederacy of bright, warm memories; molten, and impossible to unmake, however afraid he gets.

He waits for Sam in the kitchen, trying to make apologies from the air and his desire and how he feels in this house -- like a trapped animal, waiting for its world to become teeth and mud and death. In the end he just stays silent and lets Sam come into the room and fill it with noise and confusion, with his anger and the tendrils of his grief that have grown over everything, red and black and blue. He lets Sam shake him. He turns his head the other way when Sam raises a hand to hit him and when the reaction he gets is a shaking, white-knuckled fist hanging in the air like an impossible stone, Huck brings it down with his own fingers, pressing on them, down against the air currents. His kisses Sam's knuckles; he tries to blow air over the coals. He wants them to be warm again.

++

 

He dreams in the night. He's always been the kind of kid who has nightmares, who wakes up with a scream on his lips. His father told me that; Andy gave me tips, once, for just in case, when the twins (and their dad) came to stay with me in California, on how to get him back to sleep. Milk she said, with nutmeg in it, and a few squares of a Hershey bar. She didn't tell me that what worked best was just to hold him for a while, probably because she didn't think Huck would consider me an acceptable substitute for either one of his parents. This was not an entirely inaccurate assumption, and Huck never liked being hugged anyway, so I kept my distance at first, left it to Toby to do the comforting while I tried to smile and keep the milk and cookies flowing.

There was one night, though. I was up late, alone. I was trying to get a report finished, I think, and I was floating on coffee and the end of a bottle of red wine. He crept down the stairs noiselessly and touched me on the shoulder because I had my back to him, my back to the stairs. His hair was sticking up over his ears and I tried not to smile. _Hey, Huck. What's going on?_ He told me he'd had a bad dream and didn't elaborate. And I didn't know what to say. What do you say to a kid? I'm an only child who has never been a successful relationship long enough for even the possibility of learning these skills to come up. I offered him milk, cookies, chocolate, even a banana, I think. He just shook his head and shuffled his feet. I knew he'd have rather had his father there; his head in Toby's lap and Toby's hand resting on his head. That would be enough to put anyone to sleep, I thought. So I think I opened my arms to him because I'd run out of ideas and because I was thinking about Toby. I didn't expect him to nod and come round from the other side of the couch. I lifted him up, somehow, and tried to wince as discreetly as I could when his foot connected with my crotch. He put his arms around my neck and breathed out, a long, low sigh. I hesitated -- my limbs all seemed to tingle and creak and it felt the way it does when your arm or leg is coming back to life after being numb for a time, and you are frightened to move it too freely, in case it isn't yours anymore -- then I held him. We didn't talk. I didn't say a word. And after a while his breathing was slow and easy again and his heartbeat an occasional thump against my chest. I stood up, and took him back to bed for the second time in his life.

Here in the cabin he sleeps badly. The bed is too small for the both of us, really, and he is a restive sleeper. Now when he wakes I lie beside him, and stroke my hands over his breast. I'm not sure whether it helps. Or who it helps.

++

 

"Do you know about Chekov's gun?" Sam asks.

"You mention a gun in the first act, it needs to go off in the third."

"So you did study."

Huck smiles. "I did very little else."

"I was ... I was thinking about that shotgun."

"You're too much of a klutz to off yourself with a shotgun, Sam. You'd take out your priceless moulding and panelling or whatever the hell it is, but you'd miss your head."

"It's a rifle, actually."

"I think my point holds."

"You aren't worried I'll shoot anyone else?"

"Same rule applies. I guess I'll just stand directly in front of the target."

Sam kisses him. His mouth opens under Huck's fingers like a piece of overripe fruit, juices running down his wrist. Sam's lips are sweet, with honey, from the bagel he just ate.

"I feel ... I don't know what I feel anymore, Huck."

Huck puts one palm around the curve of Sam's skull, hooks the other arm up over his shoulder. "I know," he says.

"Do you think it goes away?"

"I don't know."

"Throwing rocks at me," Sam murmurs, into Huck's collar. "Just getting creamed."

"What?"

"It's nothing. Just, that I'm happy you're here."

"Where else would I be?" Huck says, trying to make it sound flippant, not at all sure that he manages it.

Sam smiles emptily. "Oh, I don't know -- maybe with your mom and your sister? Grieving?"

"Sam -- "

"No," he says, "I'm sorry." He shifts, re-arranges his hands in his lap. "You want to hear something?"

"What?"

"I told your dad ... I told him once, after your uncle, after he died ... "

"What?" Huck whispers.

"I told him that the things you do when you're hurting don't always make sense. At the time I was sure I knew what I was talking about."

"Yeah."

"I'm not sure that rule works for us. It's not that this doesn't make sense so much." He reaches for Huck's hair, passes his fingers over what there is at Huck's temples. His fingertips slide down over Huck's sideburn and tug, for a moment, in his beard. "It's really more that I don't want to see the sense."

Huck says nothing, only catches Sam's hand as it pulls back towards his lap and holds it, loosely.

++

 

He has gone. The cabin is empty again. I am standing by the trees, with the rifle. There are monsters in the woods.

One more day, and I will go back. One more day and I will fly out of here. New York first, and then California. But I'm not staying long. I need New York for this exorcism, it's streets and their sounds underneath my feet. I need to follow the Hudson. I need to sit on a bench in Central Park and read his novel. I need that city like air and heat and food. Perhaps when I'm not so hungry it will make better sense. Maybe we will make better sense.

He called me as soon as he landed. (The car is still in my driveway, beyond repair. The flights were surprisingly cheap.) He said that the was a door in Brooklyn that would never be closed, just like that, all in a rush, stuttering, swallowing some words and spitting others. I couldn't hear Toby so well, maybe because of the crackle on the line. The telecommunications out here in darkest Maine leave a lot to be desired.

He said my name, then goodbye. And then the sun went down. In the morning I will go. In the morning I will shoot the monsters.

++

 

Huck knows him from his knock. When he opens the door Sam is smiling. He is carrying a handful's worth of roses.

"Hey," he says.

"Hi."

"I'm sorry it's not a more manly gift."

"I don't care," Huck says.

"It's good to see you, Huck."

Huck nods. "You too."

"I'm sorry," Sam says. In the frame of the doorway he contracts in his penitence, but Huck concentrates on the blue of his eyes -- bluer than the skies of Brooklyn have been for months; minimal chance of rain. "That's really what I came to say. I thought maybe you'd want to hear that before you let me in."

Huck smiles. "Yeah. Me too."

"So, can I come in?"

"Sure," Huck says.


End file.
